Hannibal (about 247–183 BC) was a general of Carthage, a powerful city in North Africa, in its long war with Rome. He is remembered above all for taking a large army — and 37 elephants — across the Alps into Italy, a crossing people still tell as almost impossible. He won famous battles there, but he did not in the end take Rome. The name is a person’s name, so it is written with a capital H. Though actually, many students first hear Hannibal from the fiction character Hannibal Lecter; that later use borrows the famous name, it is not the same man. He was Carthaginian, not Roman — he fought the Romans.